There are major, but short-lived, bursts of stereoscopic 3D movies seem to come every 15-20 years or so, as another new generation is available to be briefly wowed by a technology that's not new and that doesn't really add anything to the moviegoing experience. People get over it and we move on.

IdahoEv writes: According to the release notes of Apple's latest Java update, Java is now deprecated on the Mac. This announcement came on the same day as the new Mac App Store; it seems that Apple is trying to rid the Mac of Java the same way they worked to rid the iPhone of Flash. Apparently they'd like to lock down their general purpose computer as much as they lock down their mobile devices.

This country is so very freaked about mind-altering substances, vices, and "sins", that it doesn't get talked about much. But the truth is it's been known for over a century that drinkers have cleaner arteries. Thinner blood, and/or some chemistry with the alcohol seems to help keep the plaques from forming.

Very heavy and binge drinking does start to cause other problems - and these results are what people bandy about in order to bash alcohol as a deadly vice. But it's been clear for a long time that moderate drinking can avoid those problems while still resulting in cleaner arteries. And since heart disease is the single biggest killer in the first world, it should be no surprise at all that anything which can reduce atherosclerosis results in a noticeable decrease in the death rate.

Nothing about this study is news to anyone who's paid attention to the science, anytime in the last hundred years.

It's not the yearbook, it's the book of incoming freshmen released at the start of school. It makes it easy to, for example, figure out the last name of the hottie you met yesterday by looking up all the girls named "Lisa" and seeing which one looks like the one you remember. It often even has a first name index to make finding people you've just met easier.

Every time I've used any version of FF for the last four years, once it's been running for an hour or more it starts getting these little halts/pauses where the whole browser and UI freeze for half a second every 10-30 seconds. It gets worse the longer it's been open and the more pages i've opened. I've seen it on macs, windows, and linux. I've seen it on every machine I've ever used FF on. It is independent of all plugins and add-ons because it happens in a bare browser. I don't know what causes it, but intuitively it feels like garbage collection meets a bad memory leak.

It makes video unwatchable, which is pretty much death to a browser in today's world. Incidentally, it's happened three (now four) times while writing this post.

I've seen at least 5 bug reports and at least 10 threads in the Mozilla support forum. In every case, the developers/support people seem to not understand, or not believe that it's real, yet I've (another pause there) seen it on dozens of different computers and platforms, and never met a single computer with FF that *didn't* reproduce the problem. No matter how many bug reports get filed, this problem in FF never gets fixed.

And yet, I depend on my plugins for both browsing and developing. As it is, I use FF for almost everything, but I have to switch browsers to watch video, which is really annoying, and restart FF every (another pause there) three hours, which is even more annoying./rant off

When I was a college freshman (1992) my pals and I made a pair of spreadsheets charting the CPU clock rate** and primary storage capacity of every computer any of us had owned, back to my first C-64. Both graphs made a nearly perfectly straight line on a semilog plot.

We were totally shocked that our graph predicted a 400 Mhz computer with a 40 GB hard drive in the year 2000 - the numbers seemed completely impossible.

And then 2000 rolled by, and those numbers were perfectly typical. Not much in the computer world has surprised me since then.

** Clock rate looks like it's flattened out since 2005, but only if you consider the clock rate of a single processor. If you multply rate * cores, the curve has continued more or less unabated, at least for computers I've owned.

I value sustainable development - efficient and clean energy production, and efficient and clean energy consumption. I secretly wish to become an (building) architect and design truly comfortable and energy efficient homes.